Development and Validation of Hands-off Detection Function for Steering Wheel for the CEPS System with a Torque Sensor

Traditional Hands-Off Detection (HOD) is realized by analyzing the torque applied to the steering wheel by the driver (driver torque), which is less accurate. In order to solve this problem, this paper takes the Column Electric Power Steering (CEPS) system as an object, analyzes the influence of the inertia effect and damping effect of the steering wheel and steering column on the HOD, establishes two kinds of state observers to obtain the accurate driver torque, proposes the estimation method of the road condition level, and can determine the torque threshold according to the information of the road condition level and the vehicle speed, and finally compares the driver torque and the torque threshold to obtain the HOD results. Experimentally, it is proved that this method can effectively reduce the interference of road surface interference on HOD. In addition, a fault-tolerant detection mechanism is proposed and validated to calculate the HOD result based on the frequency-domain characteristics of the torque sensor's signal only when the observer cannot work properly due to the failure of the EPS motor position sensor.